"For bridge!" he declared. "For giving weary married people the opportunity for divorce, and as an asylum from one's creditors." Wilhelmina shook her head as she gathered up her cards. "You are not at your best to-day, Gilbert," she said. "The allusion to creditors is prehistoric! No one has them nowadays. Society is such a hop-scotch affair that our coffers are never empty." "What a Utopian sentiment!" Lady Peggy murmured. "We can't agree, can we?" Deyes whispered in her ear. "You! Why they say that you are worth a million," she protested. "If I am I remain poor, for I cannot spend it," he declared. "Why not?" his hostess asked him from across the table. "Because," he answered, "I am cursed with a single vice, trailing its way through a labyrinth of virtues. I am a miser!" Lady Peggy laughed incredulously. "Rubbish!" she exclaimed. "Dear lady, it is nothing of the sort," he answered, shaking his head sadly. "I have felt it growing upon me for years. Besides, it is hereditary. My mother opened a post-office savings bank account for me. At an early age I engineered a corner in marbles and sold out at a huge profit. I am like the starving dyspeptic at the rich man's feast." Captain Austin intervened. "I declare Diamonds," he announced, and the hand proceeded. Wilhelmina leaned back in her chair as the last trick fell. Her eyes were turned towards the window. She could just see the avenue of elms down which her agent had ridden a short while since. Deyes, through half closed eyes, watched her with some curiosity. "If one dared offer a trifling coin of the realm----" he murmured. "I was thinking of your theory," she interrupted. "According to you, I suppose the whole world is made up of hunters and their quarry. Can you tell, I wonder, by looking at people, to which order they belong?" "It is easy," he answered. "Yet you must remember we are continually changing places. The man who cracks the whip to-day is the hunted beast to-morrow. The woman who mocks at her lover this afternoon is often the slave-bearer when dusk falls. Swift changes like this are like rain upon the earth. They keep us, at any rate, out of the asylums." Wilhelmina was still looking out of the window. Up the great avenue, in and out amongst the tree trunks, but moving always with swift buoyant footsteps towards the house, came a slim, dark figure, soberly dressed in ill-fitting clothes. He walked with the swing of early manhood, his head was thrown back, and he carried his hat in his hand. She leaned forward to watch him more closely--he seemed to have associated himself in some mysterious manner with the mocking words of Gilbert Deyes. Half maliciously, she drew his attention to the swiftly approaching figure. "Come, my friend of theories," she said mockingly. "There is a stranger there, the young man who walks so swiftly. To which of your two orders does he belong?" Deyes looked out of the window--a brief, careless glance.